Software firm with a Tallinn team sets a path out of vendor lock-in

MetaProject has repositioned its software engineering business around full-cycle product engineering that leaves the client team in control. The company, which has teams in San Francisco, Tallinn and Odesa, says the model is meant to stop organizations becoming permanently dependent on an outsourcing provider.

Founded in 2018, MetaProject has completed more than 50 engagements across six industries for clients in the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union. Clutch ranks it among the Top 10 app developers in Europe. It works mainly with growing and mid-market organizations that need senior engineering expertise while building their own internal technical capability.

“We kept seeing companies that technically owned their software but could not confidently operate or change it without going back to the vendor or the few developers who understood the system,” said Oleksii Bilokamenskyi, founder and CEO of MetaProject. “We decided to break that pattern starting with ourselves. If we do our job properly, the client should become more capable and less dependent on us over time.”

The approach, called Exit by Design, has three phases. During Co-Execution, MetaProject leads delivery while the client team observes and builds familiarity with the system. In Transition, the client team takes the lead while MetaProject provides mentoring, quality assurance and codifies key engineering practices. Self-Sufficiency is reached when the client team operates its own center of excellence and MetaProject steps back into an advisory role.

Through Delivery as Training, internal engineers work alongside MetaProject’s senior specialists while software is being built. Knowledge transfer continues throughout the engagement through runbooks, ADRs, pipelines and repeatable engineering practices, rather than being postponed until the final weeks. The company applies the model across product development, DevSecOps, data engineering, and generative AI and LLM development.

MetaProject says it will judge success by whether the client can continue without day-to-day external dependence, and it plans to keep developing the senior-led engineering and capability-transfer model. The announcement was issued in the United States on 20 October 2026.